Kurukaze's Tweaks

Hi.

I was just wondering how Kurukaze has been going on with his experiments to include more regiments/spec forces etc.

I appreciate that this is a time consuming job and difficult job and as someone who has no programming experience I'm not going to be critical in any way.

The more characters that can be added the better.

If there was the option to add new special forces, then may I suggest that the recon options for the Rebels and the Empire be made the additonal forces. These forces don't tend to be modifed much.

This would then free up 2 slots that are currently editable in RedEd to add other forces that may or may not be for the use of both sides.

e.g. "Black Sun Spies" for Espionage, that are quick to build for both sides, but very, very expensive, low combat values (they get paid for information, not to die), and reasonable espionage figures. This would be offset by a high maintenance value. Long term you would be best with your own Spies.

Both the existing espionage slots would then be filled with side specific Spies that are cheap to maintain, provide better intelligence (higher value), and are willing to fight it out more (higher combat figure) but take much longer to train (build)

The second "now available" slot could also be available to both sides. e.g. a "Bounty Hunters Guild" slot. Their usage could be tweaked to suit the user, from a better (but much more expensive and quickly available) version of the Noghri Death commandos abducting more powerful characters, or sabotaging facilities - take your pick.

Anyway, if Kurukaze can post a brief update of his successes/failures to add more units I'd appreciate it.

Happy Christmas everyone.

Mike

Well, for the worst part of the answer: I have not found anything like a link table yet, and I'm finally out of places to look for them

The TACTICAL.DLL and the rest of the game seem like 2 different parts - nearly 2 different games. So, the only thing that can be added without any "non functional" part around are facilities.

For units - personal and army alike - the will have no image in the tactical space fight, representing them in the "cargo slot" of ships in the fleet.

For star fighters, mixed groups have not been thought off by the programmers, the splitting into 4 groups mainly basing on fighter type also is kinda hardcoded.

So, if a MOD would disable the tactical space fight by default, this mod could run with vast types of units without the player noticing any "non functional" parts - except for the player may miss the tactical battle (I know some players always simulate results, I know for other players it is the most fun part of the game). This is just for programmers that could think of a pure building strategy game without real time elements.

That's no good news :-/

But did you check if there are any functions exported in those dlls? If they are, it might be possible to replace them by a simple trick (creating a simple wrapper library) and hence provide your own versions of hardcoded functions. Just think of the possibilities.

More tricky will be figuring out what that function you're trying to replace actually does But that's nothing a little reverse engineering couldn't fix.

Edit: I've looked into it and there seems to be some code in those dlls after all, however it is not exported outside (so it might be probably some implicit routines created by the compiler).

Oh and if you actually want to get a look at the code and don't mind getting your hands dirty with assembler, then I can fix you a date

Oh Ok.

I thought that if you could have been able to move existing recon forces into the backgound (like Mara and Kyle) in the demo, then RebEd could have been used to change the role of the new (replacement spec forces)

The only other way to do it then is to make a generic recon force that both sides can build and then use the now vacant slot for another generic force supplementing then existing resources.

C'est la vie.

P.S. I for one could handle not having the graphic of a army unit shown in the tactical battle just to have the ability to have more units to build.

However, you've already proved that the new characters are do-able, so keep up the good work!!!